How I read the news in 5 minutes

Three years ago I tracked my news habit for a week. The number was embarrassing. Ninety-one minutes a day on average. Twitter in the morning, a couple of newsletters at lunch, a rabbit hole on whatever was breaking, the evening scroll, a check-in before bed. None of it felt productive. A lot of it felt bad. And when I tried to recall, at the end of the week, the most important thing I'd learned, I came up almost blank.

I now spend five minutes a day on news. I know more about the topics I care about than I did at ninety-one. I sleep better. I read more books. I'm less anxious. The system below is what got me there. It's simpler than you'd guess and the only hard part is the first week.

What the 90-minute habit was actually doing

Two things, mostly. First, it was anesthetic. Scrolling kept my brain mildly occupied so I didn't have to sit with my own thoughts. Second, it was a status game — I wanted to be the person at dinner who knew the thing first. Neither of those is a real reason to read the news.

The third thing it was doing — actually informing me about the world — was happening, but inefficiently. The signal-to-noise ratio of an hour on Twitter is probably 20 minutes of usable context to 40 minutes of outrage, takes, and ads. The signal-to-noise of a curated five-minute briefing is roughly flipped.

Once I named what I was actually doing, the path forward got clearer.

The system, in five rules

The whole approach comes down to these. None of them are clever. The combination is what works.

Rule 1. Track topics, not publications.

The biggest unlock. I used to subscribe to publications — the New York Times, the Atlantic, the FT, a dozen newsletters. Each had its own front page. Each pulled me into stories its editors wanted me to read, not stories I actually cared about.

I switched to topics. The list, in 2026, is short: U.S./China relations, AI capability releases, F1 (the one luxury), my employer's industry, and one or two macro economic indicators. That's it. Five topics. If something happens that doesn't hit one of those, I probably don't need to know about it today.

This sounds obvious until you try it. The first week, you feel like you're missing things. By week three, you notice that the things you were “missing” were mostly outrage cycles you'd have forgotten by Friday.

Rule 2. One brief, not a feed.

Feeds are infinite by design. Briefs end. The difference changes everything about how the reading feels.

I get one brief in the morning, around 6 a.m. — a list of what moved overnight on my five topics, plus a flag for anything that contradicts what was reported the day before. I read it with coffee. It takes four to five minutes. Then I'm done with news for the day.

The mechanism matters. A feed is “is there anything new?” A brief is “here is what happened.” The first is open-ended; the second is closed. Closed reading is finishable. It feels like clearing an inbox; it gives your brain permission to stop.

Rule 3. Verify before believing.

The most expensive thing in news isn't time — it's being wrong. Every time I've confidently told someone about a story I read on Twitter that turned out to be fake, I've traded a small amount of credibility for nothing.

The fix is a single rule: I don't repeat a fact unless I have at least two sources for it. Not two outlets that copy-pasted the same wire — two genuinely independent reports. If I can't find two, I treat the story as unverified and shut up about it. The mental load drops to zero once this becomes a habit.

Rule 4. Act on changes, not noise.

Most news is noise around stable stories. Inflation is high. There's a war. The Fed will or won't cut. These are baselines. The thing worth your attention is when a baseline changes — when a number moves, a leader resigns, a treaty signs, a model launches.

I don't consume news in real time anymore. I get a ping when a story I track meaningfully changes — about four to six pings a week, on average. That's the only real-time intake I keep. Everything else lives in the morning brief, where it can be processed in batch.

Rule 5. Cut after 5 minutes.

Hard limits beat soft intentions. I set a five-minute timer when I open my brief. When it goes off, I close the app. If I haven't finished reading something, I either save it for later (rare) or accept that I'm done with it.

This sounds restrictive. It isn't. Five minutes is a lot when you're reading something that's already filtered, summarized, and verified. The vast majority of days, I finish with time left.

The tools

I won't pretend the system runs on willpower. It runs on tools that do most of the work.

I built one of them, so this is the obvious disclosure: I use Sentinel, which is the app we make, because none of the existing options handled rules 1 through 4 in one place. You create a report on a topic; the app monitors more than 1,000 trusted sources; it extracts the specific factual claims being made; it cross-checks each claim against primary sources and assigns a verdict — verified, misleading, or false; and it sends you a morning and evening brief plus story-change alerts. That maps onto rules 1, 2, 3, and 4 directly. Rule 5 is on you.

If you're committed to RSS, you can approximate the system with Inoreader or Feedly, a small list of curated feeds, and a manual rule about two-source verification. It's harder, but it's a real path. Most of the published “digital minimalism” advice points at this version.

What I gave up

I should be honest about the trade-offs. I'm no longer the person at dinner who knows the take on the twelfth-most-important story of the day. I miss some cultural moments. I find out about most things a few hours after my friends do. I've had three or four conversations in the last year where someone referenced a news event I had to ask about.

That's the cost. The benefit, for me, has been: 85 additional minutes a day, lower baseline anxiety, sharper opinions on the things I do follow, more reading of books, more present time with the people in front of me. That's a trade I'd make again every time.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know what topics to track?

Look at your last week. What did you actually talk to someone about? What did you act on — read more, made a decision, changed plans? Those are your real topics. Everything else is hobby reading, which is fine, but shouldn't be on your daily list.

What about local news?

Add it as a topic. “[your city] city council” or “[your county] schools” works. The local section of any general news app will not give you this; you have to ask for it specifically.

Five minutes feels like nothing. Won't I miss things?

You will miss things. The right question is whether you'll miss things that matter. After a year of this system, my answer has been: very rarely. The things I missed were almost all things I would've forgotten by Friday anyway.

Can I do this without an app?

Yes. The minimum viable version is: pick three to five topics, set up Google Alerts for each, batch them into one morning email read, and cut after five minutes. The verification rule (two independent sources before believing) is the part you have to self-enforce.

Try the system in one click. Open a sample brief to see what a five-minute read looks like, or download Sentinel and set up your first topic in under a minute.